Thank you, Roy Head, for such an interesting question! Hopefully this will help…
Imagine you are in your house quietly watching your 10th episode of The Great British Baking Show while drinking wine out of a coffee mug when, all of a sudden, you hear a desperate knock on the door. You tear yourself away from the choux pastry drama and open the door to find your friend. They push into your house and tell you frantically that someone is trying to kill them. You say, “Of course!” and invite them in to have some tea and some terrible scones you made after episode 6. A moment later, another knock at the door. You open the door slightly and see a large man. He asks if your friend is in the house with you. You ask him why he is looking for your friend. He says he is going to kill them. While you admire his directness, you care for your friend and do not want this large man to murder them. Would it be wrong for you to lie to the murderer?
If honesty is ALWAYS the best policy, then you shouldn’t lie EVEN in this situation. Now, notice that you don’t HAVE to lie. You could slam the door without saying anything, or try to incapacitate him with one of your rock-like scones. Yet, if we always have a duty to be honest, then lying, even in this situation, is WRONG.
Most of us have the intuition that if you lied to save your friend, then it would not be wrong. You would probably justify this by saying that being honest in this situation is not worth the life of your friend. This points to a certain flexibility in moral reasoning. While it is GENERALLY wrong to lie, there are exceptions to this rule when you have good reasons not to tell the truth, like when murderers come a-knocking. There are a few ways to justify this flexibility. First, you could point to the consequences and say that while lying might give me a tummy ache, not lying will get my friend murdered. Lying leads to better consequences, so you may (and probably should) lie. Here, you may lie because the lie is only good/bad relative to certain consequences. Second, we might say that while you have a duty to be honest, this duty must be balanced with other obligations, namely, the obligation to protect the life of an innocent person (assuming your friend is indeed innocent). In this situation, we have a stronger obligation to protect our friend than to tell the truth. This is because I have ‘all-things-considered’ reasons for protecting the life of an innocent person, while my reasons for being honest are only pro tanto (to a certain extent)reasons. It is important to note that this doesn’t mean that I don’t have an obligation to be honest, just that the obligation to be honest might be overruled by stronger obligations.
Now, one might argue that our intuitions in the ‘murderer at the door’ case are wrong, and that it is wrong to lie EVEN in this case. After all, we have bad intuitions sometimes (like that mohawk I rocked in high school). So, we might have ‘all-things-considered’ reasons to be honest after all, like the all-things-considered reasons we have to protect the life of an innocent person. This would mean that there are NO exceptions to the ‘be honest’ principle. I guess just don’t hide in these people’s houses if a murderer is chasing you.
What do you think? Is honestly always the best policy? Let us know in the comments.
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I have a Masters degree in Philosophy from the University of South Carolina where I wrote a thesis on Immanuel Kant’s political philosophy under Konstantin Pollok. I am currently doing a PhD at the University of Groningen (the Netherlands) in the project “Universal Moral Laws” under Pauline Kleingeld. I am interested in Kant’s legal and political philosophy as well as contemporary jurisprudence and republicanism. Predictably, then, my favorite philosophical work is Kant’s Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals. This work contains, in my mind, some of most important ideas for the possibility of universal and objective moral laws.